A couple of weeks ago, I blogged here about why Carphone Warehouse sucked. The conclusion of that was a refunded sale, and a new account being set up, complete with brand new modem being handed over to me.

Alas, on Monday of this week it still wasn’t working, however something different had happened: 3 Customer Services had sent me an introduction pack, which suggested that I was indeed now on their system and the problem lay somewhere else.

I made a phone call to their customer service team, and through the fact I was:

• Set up on their system so they knew who I was
• An ex-tech support guy who knew how to get them off the script they were reading at me
• The kind of person who had dug out various utilities to play with my Huawei E220 modem in ways they don’t consider sensible for the average customer
• Prepared to go on hold for 10 minutes to get one specific - and critical - piece of knowledge

I was able to get it working on OS X Leopard.

So, time to help the rest of you stumbling here via Google. To confirm, I have:

• OS X Leopard 10.5.2
• Huawei E220 mobile
• A contract with Three

You need two files, neither of which are given to you by Three - the downloads they provide are useless and not drivers. No worry though, because I have what you need.

The first is HuaweiDataCardDriver-2.7.gz So, you should install that now. You’ll need to install the right one in there for your Mac. If you’re on a Macbook, you want the Intel one if you’re not sure, but to check you can go to the Apple logo in the toolbar and click ‘About this Mac’. If it has ‘Intel’ anywhere in the text, you’re Intel. If it says PowerPC anywhere in there, you’re PowerPC. Double-click the one you need and follow the instruction.

Next, connect up the modem.

At this point the official guide goes wrong on two counts. First it tells you to open the HuaweiDataCardApp program - which Three don’t give you - and to then use it to enter an incorrect APN. So, first off here’s HuaweiDataCardApp.zip for you. Unzip it, load it up and in the box type ‘3internet’ without the quotes. Click configure, and it should tell you it’s configured the modem.

Now we’re back into familiar territory - the official guide almost makes sense.

1. Click on the Apple logo, go to System Preferences. Hit the Network pane open

2. Select the HUAWEI Mobile. The only box you want text in is ‘Telephone Number’ which should read *99# (if you’re a completely new to this Apple malarky # is found on UK keyboards by doing Alt-3). Username and Password are both blank. I would advise you ‘Show modem status in menu bar’ as well, simply as it gives you quick access on the desktop to being able to connect/disconnect the thing

3. Click on Advanced…

4. Under the Modem tab, vendor should be ‘Other’, you want to enable error correction and compression, have the dial tone ignored when dialing, tone dialing selected, sound as ‘off’.

5. Click OK, and then back in the basic settings screen hit ‘Apply’ if it isn’t shaded out. Hit ‘Connect’. Voila?

If that’s not working now you have two choices:

• If you drink in the same pub I do, ask me to take a look
• Phone Three on 0870 733 0320 and prepare to be put on hold a fair bit

Hope that helps somebody.

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before - and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be - I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own - an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

Whilst some may ask what could you do with infinite bandwidth, others are actually trying to get there. Internet2 - a research project that is surprisingly low-profile outside of those directly involved - has recently reached 100Gbps and there are, as ever, plans to go faster.

We’re at an odd period in the history of the Internet when it comes to bandwidth. We’re at speeds fast enough to provision most people’s textual and audio requirements just fine, and a few years away from being able to provide enough space for everybody’s HD video requirements. The question is, what next? What uses can we put higher speeds to? We’re quickly reaching the point where we can send data around between nodes faster than the nodes can do something useful with the data.

Once we’re at the point where data can consistently be transferred quicker than it can be processed - either by a computer or a human - we’re at a new point in the history of the network. Suddenly the big powerful boxes stitched together with string become mere silos for the data. And we, the users, reach a point where there is true saturation. At what point will the capacity for data transfer outreach the collective human capacity for making use of it?

Intel are going down the path of smaller and less power-hungry chips in future. Or so it would seem from the “as live” write-up Jon Fortt gives on his blog of the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum.

There also seems to be a concentration on mobile, which is sensible given that laptops are due to outnumber desktops as the preferred computing platform in the home and office by 2009. WiMax seems like it’s a technology Intel are excited about. Given that the OECD think it’s pants is very optimistic of them.

I have to appreciate these planned advances in hardware Intel lay out here. Better hardware makes better software possible. In recent years people have suggested that current hardware is “good enough” and we no longer have a need to persue Moore’s law and to add even more performance.

To those cynics, I say phooey.

Integrated graphics chipsets capable of teraflop performance, integrated WiMax and the ability to offload Blu-ray and HD processing to hardware opens up new avenues of development. Richer, more responsive, more useful environments can be built. It’s not that the hardware is “too much” but that we developers have imaginations that are too small, our thinking is too rigid. Stuck in a desktop/folder/document metaphor that is now out-dated, we seem to have resigned ourselves to not pushing boundaries.

For the last few years I’ve been involved in the co-ordination around the Manchester BSD User Group meetings (first Tuesday of the month, Briton’s Protection, Great Bridgewater Street), because I’ve been so heavily involved in running BSD systems over the years. In fact, I think this Summer marks the 9th year of me running BSD kit. In Unix terms that makes me a baby, but back then many of us were still running FreeBSD 2.x which would make the current crop of young admins nauseous. No package management, no easy deployment, lots of fiddling with drivers to get things working: it was real frontier land back then.

However, due to server consolidation and the fact that the cost of dedicated servers in the UK with FreeBSD are either not an option or prohibitively expensive, something bad just happened:

I no longer admin any BSD machines.

This site is now on a Debian server, and is likely to remain so for some time. All of my current projects deploy out to Linux boxes (some of them in unusual corners of the globe). The closest I can get is that the machine I’m writing this on is OS X which has FreeBSD userland under the skin.

Somehow this bothers me more than I thought it should. BSD (specifically FreeBSD) has been a staunch and loyal friend over the years to me, and without it my work would have been harder, less enjoyable and I wouldn’t have met some of the amazing people I have over the years through the BSD scene.

I expect in about 12 months I’ll be in a position to be buying new hardware of my own rather than leasing somebody else’s kit, but by then I expect it’ll be more economical to be on an elastic cloud based on Xen than it will be to own my own iron in a data centre. Even if it makes sense to own the iron, there is a good chance I might be going down the Solaris route as I like some of the virtualisation work they’re doing. In other words, I’m not sure if BSD is in my future outside of a hobby interest.

For now then, I’ll still be going to the BSD meets, and I’ll probably even try and keep a box running somewhere so I can track -CURRENT, but today is a sad day for me: I don’t know the next time I’ll cvsup the ports tree and portupgrade. I don’t know the next time I’ll be thankful for the sane and consistent documentation of the system I’m using. I don’t know the next time I’ll feel like I’m using a real Unix built by real Unix people.

What I do know is that I’ll always think of the BSD distros out there as the best open source Unix on the planet, and the people working on them as the best developers bar none. Thanks to all of them for their hard work and keeping me entertained whilst earning my rent for the last decade.

Johnathan Schwarz announced something yesterday that at first sounds quite dull until you read through his justification and where he’s heading with it.

Basically they take the UltraSPARC T2 blueprints, the core design files and test suites and then they release the whole lot under GPL online

It’s a gutsy move in that it completely breaks the model of what you’re meant to do with R&D expenditure in the computer industry. He already has experience of this with OpenSolaris of course, but to do this with hardware is unprecedented.

The impressive figures he quotes in his justification for opening up UltraSPARC also pricks my ears:

You’ll recall we followed this path with our software business - decoupling Solaris from its exclusive focus on Sun hardware. That experience validated the obvious: the market for Sun’s innovation is always larger outside of Sun, than inside. When we opened ourselves to the market, our business grew faster (Software grew 13%, year over year, faster than Sun overall). Now we’re following that path with our microelectronics business.

Let’s make this clear: he opened up Solaris open source, allowed it to run in more places, and the business grew 13% year on year.

It seems counter-intuitive: give something of value away, watch the value of your business grow. But that’s how software works as a commodity. License keys have no value, user base has value. Keeping a little team of ‘rockstar developers’ in-house to develop code has no value - having thousands of developers passing ideas through you does have value.

How you monetise that needs to change based on the area you’re sat within, but the argument that open source is not a valid business model increasingly seems to be looking to be a myth. Arguing the only way to make money is to charge for everything you do ignores the fact you can probably make a lot more by allowing other people to do it for you, on similar terms.

Whilst social photo sites like Flickr have grown over the last few years, many developers have been asking “now we have the resource, what do we do with it”. The first interesting application was tag clouds - it allowed you to see from the metadata in the system what was there and get an idea of how ‘heavy’ some concepts were. But what to do with the imaging itself? All those photos, and no easy way of making use of all the data they contained.

I’ve been ploughing through TED talks (no surprise that my favourite section is the What’s Next in Tech area), and have been meaning to post up lots of the talks, but one being discussed on a mailing list I’m on this morning is the demo of Photo Synth. Here’s the official video:

There are a couple of interesting things about this. Firstly, whilst the first half of the demo - a demo of Sea Dragon, a resolution independent image library - is interesting, there’s nothing truly novel about it. The only limitation stopping that system from being produced in the past is processing power. Every Computer Science/Software Engineering undergrad I knew had that idea whilst in the labs at University.

The second half though - the demo of Photo Synth - is what really grabs people’s attention. By computing vanishing points and common overlaps in images, it becomes possible to build a 3D representation of the object being photographed (in this case, Notre Dame) that you can take a virtual tour through. The applications are fascinating, not least because it takes mapping to a whole new level, and starts answering questions about what we’re going to start doing with all this social media.

One thing I noticed about that application, is if you upload a photo into a set that this software is processing, the software has to ultimately work out where you were in relation to the object. If just one photo in the set is geo-tagged (and many camera phones coming onto the market have in-built PS), I can work out your precise location. Now, let’s suppose you go on a tour of Paris. You take lots of photos all over the city. I now know your location when you were taking each of them. What’s more, the image will have within its metadata the exact date and time. I can, from that, construct a complete trace of where you spent your day from morning until night, with GPS-accurate location data, even though you didn’t have a GPS unit on you. Intelligence agencies are going to love this stuff…

Another interesting thought, is how this is being called a “Microsoft technology”. It wasn’t developed at Microsoft - they bought it in, and have worked out how to bring it to market. Well, when I say bring it to market, I mean do what Microsoft always do: make it available for Windows machines, but pretend the rest of the World doesn’t exist - the tech preview doesn’t work on Linux and OS X at the moment. This is a typical “flat World mentatility” prevailing at Microsoft I hope they’re going to change soon.

Microsoft are buying in a lot of innovation at the moment. They know they have a shortfall in innovative thinking (that’s what happens when your revenue is made up of sales of operating system software you can’t radically change and Office software everybody hates), but they have a big pile of money in the bank. By buying up the ideas and then pushing it out there, Microsoft are getting a lot of credibility within the geek community, and hopefully the idea-hungry culture will start to infect the rest of the company. I suspect a lot of people at Microsoft got a slight kick in the stomach when they saw Surface all over the web last month, simply because it’s such a radical change in how Microsoft looks at itself and answers the question “what is it we do?”

I have absolutely no respect for Microsoft, its software, or its business practices - I genuinely hope that for the sake of humanity the OSS community gets their act together and puts them out of business - but I’m starting to warm to some of the ideas and their employees.

I really like the idea of this Zonbu machine even if the revenue model seems to be based on reselling Amazon’s S3, which I still don’t trust as a platform as my main data backup, never mind my primary data space.

This is a fanless (i.e. noiseless) 1.2 MHz system that uses Linux and stores all your files on S3 so you can get them from anywhere where you’re online. It uses very little power and is designed with ease-of-use in mind. Whether it really is “as easy to use as a Mac”, time will tell, but it’s definitely an interesting piece of hardware.

This kind of box is going to be all over the place in a very short space of time. I was talking to somebody at Sun the other day who suggested they’d love to find a way of getting something like this out in a form-factor that made sense within the home, and with the innards of a Sun Ray and the right platform, it could be a real revenue stream for them quite quickly. They just need to partner with the right people.

A few years ago I made a prediction that when broadband got affordable at speeds over 8Mbps (the minimum speed you’d need to throw Freeview-quality digital down the line at real time, no downloads or extra compression needed), we’d start to see a new generation of devices that would offer full video-on-demand, with a move to put archives of content out there, ad-free, in return for micro-payments.

We’re seeing the broadband, and the video-on-demand is starting to roll, but they’re being cautious with it right now. The BBC Archive (due to launch in beta in the next month or two, apparently) is a step in the right direction, but it’ll take a while for commercial companies like ITV and Sky to realise they can make money from their archives without relying on adverts.

The Zonbu is a great little device that provides an alternative direction for the market - a functional Linux PC connected to your TV. Connecting computers to TVs is a great way to get devices out into people’s homes - look at what happened in the 80s with the micro revolution. If Zonbu can somehow integrate a video-on-demand service down the line, they could really make some headway into some interesting markets. One to watch.

Either way, I think we’re about to see a whole new generation of users get connected in the next two years in Europe and the US through decent set-top devices (not like the lousy first-gen boxes from a few years back). That new demographic, coupled with the proliferation of mobile Internet over Africa and Asia, means we’re going to see an underlying shift in how the Web is used, how it operates, and what expectations of the next generation of technology is going to be over the next 5 years.

Personally, I can’t wait.

• via WhatsNext

For the last year, I’ve been running pretty much everything off old hardware I had lying around. It did its job - and still does it very well - but it’s time for an upgrade.

I’m now in the fortunate position that for the first time in about two years I actually have a small amount of spare cash to hand. Well, when I say “spare”, I mean “not immediately needed to pay a bill anywhere”. This means I have choices.

The first thing I need to decide is whether I want to stay with Apple or not. OS X has been my primary desktop for the last 2 years, and whilst it has a few features that make it stress-free - decent WiFi and phone synch support out of the box, combined with the integrated address book - there isn’t anything I couldn’t replicate in open source without a bit of tinkering. And I do miss running an entirely open source system. There’s also the fact that Apple hardware is ridiculously expensive for what it is. Component for component, even the cheapest Macbook can be had by a generic laptop supplier for nearly half the price.

I also need to decide on the level of portability I want or need. About six months ago, my laptop’s screen got fallen on (aka “The Guinness Problem”), and I haven’t got around to fixing it yet. That means it’s been anchored to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse for the last six months. There have been perhaps three occasions in all that time where I could have done with it being a laptop again, instead of a very quiet and power-efficient desktop. I anticipate in the next 3 months a total of five occasions - all of them “get around”-able - where I could do with power on the road and so I have to ask whether the premium for a laptop is worth it. I’m already planning on an E90 Communicator when they hit the market, so my “ssh whilst in the coffee shop” problem is taken care of. It’s whether I need something portable I can code on that is the issue.

This last one has led me to a rather philosophical point. The reason I am naturally resistant to getting a dream-machine dual-head, or even triple-head desktop setup, is that I don’t want to feel that moving from Manchester would require a great deal of thought. A laptop has the feeling that I could just pick myself up, pack a bag, and head anywhere in the World and still be in business. That feeling is perhaps immature, but I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” in recent days and I’m not convinced it isn’t just that I’m in need of spending some time on the road. Either way, I know taking root in a way that closes that choice out would make me feel a little peculiar right now.

All this results in me now trying to decide what the right hardware to buy is, not on technical specifications or pipedreams of how technically superior I could be if I bought “X”, but a much deeper philosophical perspective: what do I want out of life? Do I want to be here in Manchester? Do I want the hassle-free existence of OS X, or the unbridled freedom and moral authority of a completely open source system?

Stupidly “Big Questions” to be asking of a technology purchase. Especially when the answer might just be a couple of a Mac Minis or a Stinkpad.

Will writes about his life in computers as part of another meme that seems to be spreading. My life in computers is indicative of quite how poor my family were when I was growing up - a bit painful in places, alas.

I remember my first experience of a computer at home was my elder sister’s Vic20. I don’t remember ever getting a chance to do more than play games on it when I was about 5 or so, but I remember looking at the source code for BASIC programs and thinking “I wish I could do that”. Occasionally my Dad (at that time an accountant, he later became a systems analyst working on AS/400 systems in California) would bring home an Apple or IBM system to take a look at.

At primary school we regularly got to work on a BBC Master, mostly working in a language called LOGO that was meant to teach us about angles, recursion in geometry and the basics of algorithms I suppose.

When I got to secondary school, I started to teach myself during lunch breaks in the computer room - by borrowing a book from the school library on BBC BASIC and taking up the computer teacher’s offer of letting us use the computer suite for our own projects during Lent in return for a donation to CAFOD (I went to a Catholic school), I got to understand the basics.

For several years I didn’t have access to a computer at all at home. I would spend my evenings writing out programs on paper at home and dry-running them before going into school the next day and typing them in and seeing how I fared. This meant I developed a real eye for syntax that I’ve since lost in lieu of “Save, tab over, run” - something I need to get back, perhaps.

At the age of about 12 or 13 I managed to get an Amstrad CPC 6128 at home thanks to my Dad swagging it from my now step-Mum for a few week’s pocket money. I should point out that this was at a time when most of my peers were coding on Amiga 500 and Atari ST machines - I was fully a whole generation out - and it would be like giving somebody an Amiga today. Even so, I was loved it and was grateful for the chance to write code at home. It had the same 3” disk as Amstrad PCW machines, it’s own green monochrome monitor (CPCs didn’t plug into TVs) that used to give me headaches and my mother would complain if I left it set up in the living room for more than about 15 minutes.

Around this time my Father then donated to me an original twin-floppy IBM XT. It also had a dedicated green screen and was at the time I got it approximately 7-8 years old. It didn’t have a graphics card and had serious problems running contemporary software, however it did introduce me to MS-DOS and the ‘Microsoft way’ of doing certain things. This machine died when I took it around to a friend’s house a few years later, and I have a horrible feeling my step-dad eventually put the enclosure in a bin - something I deeply regret now for the environmental consequences as much as the fact I would love to have kept it for sentimental reasons.

I also seem to recall a BBC Micro coming home around this time that was pretty much DOA despite it costing a considerable amount to purchase from one of my school teachers. That little lesson taught me a lot about who to trust and how to check out a machine completely before purchasing - a boot-up is not the same as a functioning machine. I don’t know where that machine ended up.

I mostly however begged, borrowed and paid for computer time - my hometown of New Mills was the first place in the UK outside of London to get a cyber-cafe, and so I spent a lot of time hanging around there and the computer suite at the sixth form college I ended up attending (The Ridge) using Internet access as and when I could and coding up stuff in QBasic and occasionally C. At University I was regularly in the computer labs, almost moving into UMIST’s MSS J9 and Sackville cluster at times. I was working full-time in the suite in Kilburn building in the summer of 1997, and spent most of time trying to work out how to get around the various systems admins had put in place to prevent me from doing useful things (like, for example, run a decent compiler).

It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that I actually ended up owning my own system that could reasonably be argued as being ‘up-to-date’. Prior to that, it had always been somebody else’s hardware or a generation or two out of date. That first machine was a cheap Taiwanese import laptop with an AMD processor bought from Morgan Computer on Piccadilly approach. I carried it through a mob of rioting Millwall fans and Police horses outside Piccadilly station to get it home.

Since then I’ve owned a whole variety of machines, mostly bought off eBay because I hate paying showroom prices and know what I’m doing. The most noted of these machines amongst friends being my Thinkpad 240 (nicknamed ‘Stinky’) which I infamously took to pieces in the middle of the pub during a BSDUG because somebody had a screwdriver handy. My most recent self-build was a Shuttle XPC that now serves my sister, brother-in-law and niece at their home in the Peak District: it is considerably faster and better equipped than any machine I could have ever dreamed of owning as a teenager.

I’m writing this on an iBook G4 which has been my primary machine for the last year or so. I have with me an old Celeron desktop I use for the occasional journey into Windows, a pile of older hardware I keep because it deserves a good home (a Sun IPX, a Vax, various old laptops that served me well over the years). It’s time for a major round of upgrades though.

I’m currently thinking through my choices on my next purchase, planned for June or thereabouts. Currently I’m thinking a 15” Macbook might be a good fit because I need to be able to run Linux, OS X and Vista and one machine to do all three would be a good fit. Staying portable gives me some flexibility as well, although the price premium for Apple hardware is really bothering me - I might just abandon supporting OS X and go for a cheaper x86 machine that is better equipped.

I found this rather entertaining ‘review’ of sorts earlier today, and it made me think about my own relationship with Apple. There’s no doubt they’ve raised expectations of what consumers are expecting from their computers these days, but I have had a love/hate relationship with their machines going back over a decade.

It all change a couple of years back however, when I was running FreeBSD on all my machines at home, and where I could, at work. A lot of people involved in FreeBSD at the time were switching to Apple, and it became clear that a lot of them weren’t coming back. See, under the skin of OS X - Apple’s newest operating system - is a Unix that is based in large part on FreeBSD. One of the first to move over was Jordan Hubbard, who started the FreeBSD project and is, to my knowledge, still head of release engineering at Apple on the OS X product. He has been followed professionally by many people, and in terms of users, I don’t know of any local BSD guys who were knocking around a few years ago who don’t own Apple hardware yet.

My reaction to this at first, was somewhat… well… judge for yourself. On a FreeBSD mailing list, somebody asked if anybody had any tips for a BSD’er starting on OS X. My reply, below, aptly represents my attitude at the time (and yes, I did used to be this aggressive nearly all the time, jerk that I was):

My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily and cheaply upgrade parts of your laptop, built as it is on commodity hardware with 3rd-party suppliers being plentiful. You’ll find either the manufacturer’s support much better than Apple’s, alternatively you won’t have to travel 300 miles to find your “local” dealer as pretty much any computer store in the country will be able to carry out any repairs you need. Spares will be cheaper, labour will be cheaper, and you will not be without your laptop for 3 months whilst a replacement TFT screen sits on a boat from Korea slowly plodding it’s way to you, thanks to a ridiculous spares and repairs policy.

In addition, you won’t be contributing to the “brain drain” that Apple has caused on the Open Source movement, will understand more about how your computer works as a result, and won’t spend half your working day fighting bouncing icons, “helpful” software that constantly tries to break into every WAP point within range and a user interface that was specifically designed to be helpful to 5-year olds and your technophobic mother. You’ll instead get to use an OS and an interface designed for somebody who understands computers, not have to put up with one that assumes you are a 6th-grader with learning difficulties.

Plus, brilliantly, people won’t point at you and laugh when you get your laptop out on a plane or in a cybercafe for spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that isn’t as powerful as Intel-based competitors just because you think it “looks neat”. You will be considered by your peers to be a man instead of a boy, a leader instead of a follower, and you won’t get any more snide e-mails like this when you post to a FreeBSD list for help with your hardware.

Hope that helps. Sorry it was you that suffered my rant on Apple kit, but you are, to my knowledge, the first in a while.

I will now don the fireproof suit.

You know what the really ironic thing about that is? Two weeks later I needed to buy a new laptop. I didn’t want to go through the pain of configuring a load of drivers and just wanted a laptop with supported bluetooth and WiFi out of the box, with some reasonably familiar BSD-style Unix. At the time I was working for a University and qualified for Apple’s educational discount. Price wise, I couldn’t get a similar spec Thinkpad - or indeed any other laptop - to compete with the iBook G4 I’m typing this article on right now. Yes, I switched. I am a hypocrite. After blasting a guy with all that, I went out and bought an Apple.

I am now at a point where within a few weeks I will need to buy some new hardware, and once again I am considering the value proposition of an Apple box. They aren’t cheap, but given that it’s a FreeBSD userland under the skin, and they now have a decent processor inside, it’s starting to look tempting to drop a couple of thousand quid on a Macbook Pro.

The problem is, when I bought the iBook it made me a bit of a radical. Now, it just makes me the same, but a different kind of sameness. When I had a coffee in my usual place in town this afternoon, I noticed 4 people using laptops - all of them Apple’s of one flavour or another. They all looked like they should be using Apple machines: they didn’t look Unix types to me, more “I don’t know how to use my mobile phone properly” types.

Whilst Apple were able to leverage the fact that Toshiba, Dell, Sony Vaio and Acer laptops were all a bit ‘samey’, the problem they might now face is that Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware now signals to the nearby people in the know that the buyer doesn’t really know what to buy so just bought something ‘easy’. There is much more variety in the non-Apple laptop market than there is within Apple’s range, and its starting to feel like a severe and horrible weakness on Apple’s part.

What’s more, whilst Apple produces a pretty decent operating system, it’s not perfect. I do prefer the power and adaptive configurations you can push a ‘real’ Unix into, even if that means I don’t get to run various commercial applications. I can now get a cheap laptop with similar high-speed Intel hardware inside to a Macbook Pro from a variety of other manufacturers and roll out Ubuntu, OpenSolaris or even my old ally in times of war, FreeBSD, with relative ease: driver configuration has improved leaps and bounds.

Oddly, by buying a Sony, or even a Dell, I would now actually mark myself out as being a little bit different once more. I’d save money, and get all the advantages of cheap servicing I mentioned in my post above. The one thing that might make me stick with Apple? I think I might have subconsciously become an Apple Fanboy. It’s not that I want to lick my Apple hardware, but I like not thinking about it, and maybe the kids in the coffee shop are onto something: who wants the pain of thinking about hardware when all you want to do is write, produce videos, mix music, write software, whatever?